On Thu, Mar 6, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Philip Sandifer <snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I will repeat my conviction that our notability
guidelines are the
biggest PR blunder we engage in.
Perhaps, as David says, BLP are greater, but the problem there is not
generated by Wikipedia's internal culture; it's created by people
coming in from outside to add things. 'Notability', though, is a
problem we grew all on our own.
Which is all the more frustrating given that the
problem with most of
these trivia sections seems to be an interface problem rather than a
fundamental content problem. Because we've adopted too many artifacts
of print like purely linear article design and spatial arrangement on
a single page we're stuck with masses of data and side notes being a
distraction to the articles. As a result we steadily delete valuable
content that is not reproduced elsewhere and will not be reproduced
elsewhere.
Exactly. And it's got to the point now that deletionists are
enforcing "one topic, one article" by making it impossible to break
out further information to sub-articles, which is the natural and
hypertext thing to be doing.
-Matt